Some of the older OS X critters in the buildfarm are failing regression,
with symptoms showing that a request for 100% sampling in BERNOULLI or
SYSTEM methods actually gets only around 50% of the table. gdb revealed
that the computation of the "cutoff" number was producing 0x7FFFFFFF
rather than the expected 0x100000000. Inspecting the assembly code,
it looks like gcc is trying to use lrint() instead of rint() and then
fumbling the conversion from long double to uint64. This seems like a
clear compiler bug, but assigning the intermediate result into a plain
double variable works around it, so let's just do that. (Another idea
would be to give up one bit of hash width so that we don't need to use
a uint64 cutoff, but let's see if this is enough.)
The original implementation of TABLESAMPLE modeled the tablesample method
API on index access methods, which wasn't a good choice because, without
specialized DDL commands, there's no way to build an extension that can
implement a TSM. (Raw inserts into system catalogs are not an acceptable
thing to do, because we can't undo them during DROP EXTENSION, nor will
pg_upgrade behave sanely.) Instead adopt an API more like procedural
language handlers or foreign data wrappers, wherein the only SQL-level
support object needed is a single handler function identified by having
a special return type. This lets us get rid of the supporting catalog
altogether, so that no custom DDL support is needed for the feature.
Adjust the API so that it can support non-constant tablesample arguments
(the original coding assumed we could evaluate the argument expressions at
ExecInitSampleScan time, which is undesirable even if it weren't outright
unsafe), and discourage sampling methods from looking at invisible tuples.
Make sure that the BERNOULLI and SYSTEM methods are genuinely repeatable
within and across queries, as required by the SQL standard, and deal more
honestly with methods that can't support that requirement.
Make a full code-review pass over the tablesample additions, and fix
assorted bugs, omissions, infelicities, and cosmetic issues (such as
failure to put the added code stanzas in a consistent ordering).
Improve EXPLAIN's output of tablesample plans, too.
Back-patch to 9.5 so that we don't have to support the original API
in production.
Fix some places where pgindent did silly stuff, often because project
style wasn't followed to begin with. (I've not touched the atomics
headers, though.)
Add a TABLESAMPLE clause to SELECT statements that allows
user to specify random BERNOULLI sampling or block level
SYSTEM sampling. Implementation allows for extensible
sampling functions to be written, using a standard API.
Basic version follows SQLStandard exactly. Usable
concrete use cases for the sampling API follow in later
commits.
Petr Jelinek
Reviewed by Michael Paquier and Simon Riggs
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane
Simon Riggs